These Are the Worst Finales Ever, According to TV Lovers

10/08/2019

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No matter how much you love a TV show, the way you remember it, engage with it and revisit it is entirely determined by its ending. Serve up a satisfying, narratively consistent finale, and fans will rave about a show for years. But fail to land that plane, and it can sour years of hard work.

These Are the Worst Series Finales in TV History

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In a recent thread on Twitter, fans have been debating which of their favorite shows failed to stick the landing, prompted by a tweet from The Ringer citing the conclusion of serial killer drama Dexter as a controversial ending that was "universally panned." Here are some of the top contenders for worst finale in television history:

Game of Thrones

Maybe we'll look upon the ending to the epic HBO saga with kinder eyes in years to come, but for a lot of fans, the Game of Thrones finale still stings . After meticulously building a world and developing characters over the previous eight years, showrunners Benioff and Weiss ran out of time in which to tell the rest of their story and crammed entire seasons' worth of plot into a few short hours . Ultimately, that means "The Iron Throne" left fans with all kinds of questions .

Where did Drogon take Dany's body ? Will the remaining Six Kingdoms fall back in line after Sansa's Brexit? And did the psychic Bran let all those war crimes happen just so he could be King at the end? We'll never know.

The spate of Star Trek shows that ran throughout the 90s and early 00s all had finales which felt right for their characters; The Next Generation came full circle, Deep Space Nine's long-running war storyline ended in hard-won peace, and Voyager finally reached home after seven years lost in space. But the finale of prequel show Enterprise, presumably designed to appeal to fan sensibilities by having the events of the show revealed to be a holographic simulation watched by Next Generation characters Riker and Troi, irked viewers. As endings go, it's not much better than "it was all a dream," and did the cast of Enterprise a disservice by distracting from their performances in favor of a pair of guest stars.

Star Trek: Enterprise, "These Are the Voyages." It won't ever 'win' these lists, because the show was not terribly popular, but it was not only bad by any measure--it was actively insulting to the cast and crew, and they were on the record as being visibly upset at the time. Gary Alexander (@grylxndr)

How I Met Your Mother

What started as a cute concept for a sitcom (a man recalls his twentysomething adventures while telling his kids about their mom) soon became a convoluted exercise in delayed gratification. With each new season, even as the performances of the core cast continued to delight fans, it got less and less likely that the reveal of 'The Mother' would be a pleasing one.

As it turned out, the introduction of Cristin Milioti in the final season did work; she was charming, funny, beautiful, and you could totally see her and Ted living happily ever after... Which is why it sucked so hard to have Milioti's character gracelessly killed off so that Ted could reunite with Robin , the woman he had been pining for since the pilot episode. Not only did it solidify Ted as a textbook Nice Guy who is "rewarded" with the love of a woman after years of friendship, but it also undermined a lot of what we'd come to know about Robin, who was pretty awesome and deserved way better than either Ted or Barney.

The How I Met Your Mother finale was so bad it ruined what was otherwise a pretty great show, I still can't go back and rewatch https://t.co/BqIJAPLdsk Molly Quinton (@molly_quinton)

The Sopranos

Now famous for refusing to show explicitly how the story of the Soprano crime family ends, instead opting to simply cut to black, "Made in America" initially led some viewers to believe their TV had broken at a crucial moment. It has since been called a "fuck you to the audience", although writer and director David Chase has defended the ending on multiple occasions, saying that he credits fans of The Sopranos with not needing to be "spoon-fed every little thing."

The series finale of True Blood suffers from coming at the end of its most maligned season. Let's be real, this Southern Gothic soap opera went off the rails somewhere in season three or four, but the addition of new characters , monsters and magic each year meant the show had mutated from a fun watch to a real slog. Just getting to the finale felt like hard work, and then once fans arrived, they were treated to an array of TV ending cliches; a wedding, a drawn out deathbed farewell, and a flash-forward which showed series heroine Sookie Stackhouse married to some faceless guy with a bunch of kids. The episode was entitled "Thank You", and frankly, that's what fans were saying to their TVs once this overstuffed final chapter was finally over.

Author:
Philip Ellis
Source:
Men's health

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